Some thoughts on some recent changes, how they dovetail together, and some implications for users, creators and the future of Civitai.
First, we have the tightening of yellow buzz availability. Basically, the only way to earn it now is to get tipped, win it in contests or bounties, or buy it either as part of a membership or a separate purchase. Everything else is blue, with all the restrictions that go with it.
Second, we have the changes to buzz costs for extra resources used in generation. Short story: extra loras will cost extra buzz per generation.
Finally, we have the updated creators program. In a nutshell, creators can get paid real USD as follows: be a “qualified creator”, a member, and bank/lock yellow buzz with Civitai. Each month a pool of revenue will be divided between everyone who meets the above conditions, proportional to how much yellow buzz they bank. E.g., if the pool of cash is $10,000 and you lock in 10% of the total buzz based for that month, you get $1000. If you put in 1% of the total, you get $100.
What does all this mean, other than the obvious that yellow is much more scarce now, and generation costs have increased, in some cases considerably?
Well, let’s look at the first two. The main way to earn (rather than buy) yellow buzz is through people using your LoRAs etc. Using LoRAs now costs more. Am I the only person to connect these dots? People will be less likely to use extra resources. This is, I believe, intended and the announcement is pretty up front about this. The upshot of this is that creators will earn less yellow buzz from people using their LoRAs. While this impact isn’t stated openly, I think this is also deliberate.
On to the big-ticket item, the new “improved” 🙃creators program! This method of dividing up a prize or payout pool isn’t new. I saw a lot of similar schemes in places like Steemit when I was part of that community 2018-2020. I’ve made my point in comments elsewhere, but I want to be really clear about what it means for what (and how) creators can earn.
Like I said before, whoever puts in the most buzz takes the biggest cut. My understanding is that metrics of generations etc. won’t directly come into determining the monthly creators payouts. Sure, if you made a very popular LoRA, you’ll have some yellow buzz to “invest”. But you could also have lots of yellow buzz to invest because you aquired it though a higher tier membership or bought a lump sum.
Yes, everyone hoping to earn real money has to be paying for at least a bronze membership. So in that sense there is already a barrier to earning in addition to being good enough to be approved as a qualified creator (whatever that entails.)
That aside, it’s clear that buzz balances and not talent or popularity will determine the USD payouts.
This will create some perverse incentives. If you are earning or buying yellow, and are eligible for the payout, you will earn the most by locking as much as possible into the monthly investment pool. This creates incentive against creators in the program from spending yellow buzz to train new LoRAs. It only makes sense to train new resources using blue.
Get tipped yellow buzz? Forget it. People are going to hoard that stuff like gold.
So it can look like the most optimal way to earn under this system is to do the minimum to qualify for cash payouts, then buy & invest as much yellow buzz as you can.
This is intended by the devs & architects of this scheme. They haven’t stated it outright, but they want potential creators to think that you need to buy yellow buzz to take a bigger slice of that sweet sweet USD cash pie. (Mmm, cash pie.)
Of course, there is a risk involved trying to purchase your way to the top of the payout pyramid. If the amount of buzz invested is too large compared to the cash pool, then you could easily earn less per buzz than it cost you to buy. Actually, I predict that things will, coincidentally, always work out like that. You can’t have someone buying $500 worth of buzz then collecting a $1000 payout at the end of the month.
Note too that the amount in the pool will vary every month. While the announcement is missing some details, I bet you won’t know what the pool you’re competing for is until the payouts occur. This makes it hard to asses cost/benefit ratios, but also means Civitai can ensure the outcome they want, regardless of how much/little yellow buzz is staked.
Like I said, similar systems of dividing up payouts have existed for a while in crypto - in Steem’s case for block mining/generation. But because all that - what the pool was, how much everyone was staking etc. was on a public blockchain, you could at least see exactly how badly Ned Scott and the various whales were fucking you over.
In Steemit and similar systems, the total amount of a token was either known & limited and/or mined at a predictable rate and was traded on an open market. So if someone wanted to dominate the daily prize pool by purchasing as much steem as possible, their demand would quickly lead to the price rising. Even though small payers were exploited horribly, in that situation we could at least make some cash by selling during the resulting price spike, especially if we were lucky enough to have bought during a previous dip.
For yellow buzz - and I’m open to being corrected - the amount that is “created” every day through purchase or creator rewards is open ended. Nor can yellow be traded on an open and reasonably efficient market. If a qualified creator decides to buy, say, $10,000 worth of yellow buzz and stake it in the pool with the sole intention of screwing more talented creators out of a fair share of their monthly payout, what’s to stop them?
Are we really going to rely on a cash-strapped business saying no to creators buying up yellow for any reason? I think not. Would I trust that they’d tell someone who buys a lot of buzz that they can’t use it to stake in the prize pool? Again, I think not.
When I heard that yellow could be cashed out, I was pretty interested in making resources, even if it only meant a few extra $ per month. But the idea that my payout could be primarily determined by the amount of yellow I could afford to stake is, frankly, the worst sort of galaxy-brained crypto-bro bullshit.
Sigh.
Look, a system where buzz of any sort can be cashed out for real folding money is always going to be fraught with difficulty. The barriers to earning, like membership, are primarily to guard against what I used to see a lot of in my steemit days. There were soooo many spammers, plagiarists and scam artists running networks of bot accounts to milk a few bucks per day out of the system by posting low-effort slop. I used to be pretty judgmental of this and spent a lot of time & energy trying to limit their activities. But, really, a lot of these people were from poor countries trying to make what was, for them, some much needed cash in a hard & transferable currency.
If there’s one thing the devs & owners don’t want, it’s this place being flooded with thousands more poor people trying to cash out a few dollars each month.
Anyway, the whole thing has left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Making sure poor people can’t earn. Making sure those with the most money earn the most. All of this regardless of actual ability and talent.
I’m not an idiot. (Ok, so there are mixed opinions on that.) I’m definitely not dumb enough to think that this place was some sort of wacky socialist utopia. But I did think it might at least attempt to base payouts on merit or popularity.
I have no stake in this. Even with a membership I’m unlikely to ever earn enough to make it worth even going through the motions. But the idea that I could earn more than really talented creators by buying up enough buzz is ludicrous and just plain wrong.
None of this will end well. Incentivising the buying & hoarding of yellow buzz at the same time as disincentivising the creation of new resources (not to mention disincentivising people from using those resources) will reduce quality and engagement, driving away the people that this site needs most.